


no escape.

by hyzkoa



Category: Ao no Exorcist | Blue Exorcist, The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-12
Updated: 2019-11-12
Packaged: 2021-02-01 06:14:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21413233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hyzkoa/pseuds/hyzkoa
Summary: Statement of Amaimon, regarding the five years he allegedly spent trapped in his bedroom after receiving a tasteless gift from his boss, Johann Faust. Statement taken directly from subject by Lewin Light, archival assistant of the True Cross Institute, Japan.
Relationships: Amaimon & Mephisto Pheles
Comments: 1
Kudos: 16





	no escape.

**Author's Note:**

> this is my piece for the reverie ao no exorcist zine! it's an au based on my favorite podcast, the magnus archives. hope u guys like it

"Statement of Amaimon-- is that really your name?" 

No answer. Lewin smiles and continues, "Regarding what he claims--"

"It happened."

"Regarding the five years he spent stuck in his bedroom. Statement taken directly from subject by Lewin Light, assistant archivist of the True Cross Institute, Japan. Statement taken…" He searches through his clothes. "Do you have the time?" Lewin looks up to ask the subject.

"Twenty two hours, thirty four minutes and eleven seconds."

Lewin raises his brow, but doesn’t comment; he has heard and seen weirder. "... You know, people who come here to share their spooky stories usually don’t choose any hour past 6, or 18, to drop by."

Silence. Amaimon has yet to look at him from the moment he sat down before the tape recorder, his eyes are fixed on the wall behind him where Lewin knows there is nothing but old wallpaper. His hands are busy tearing apart paper he had been offered had he preferred to leave his statement in written form. Lewin takes the pile of shredded white material as a no.

“This is when you explain why you’re so late in here.”

“I was running out of things to do to keep me awake, so I am giving a statement now.”

“More like stalling.”

"You're supposed to give me a cue."

"I just did."

Amaimon stares at him, unblinking and unamused. 

“I got a clock.” He says simply.

Lewin doesn’t say anything this time, letting the other work it out in his own way. He smiles, staring at him through long dark bangs that desperately needed some trimming.

Amaimon got a clock-- or rather, someone got one for him. As a gift, which was weird enough as it is and, in hindsight, he should’ve seen that as a red flag by itself; getting gifts, let alone unprompted, was not something that happened often in his life. Or at all. So, naturally, he was wary of this box that lay on his center table as he stared and poked at it from his couch. 

It was a big cuckoo clock that undoubtedly would be the first thing anyone would see should he hang it on his living room's wall. Add to that that the design and colors of it were a complete contrast of the otherwise normal flat he lived in. Painfully normal, actually, besides the strikes of eccentricity here and there; normal couch, normal table, normal unorganized bookshelf where books on the occult sat right next to livelier titles that he barely touched, compared to the worn out cookbooks. And although he had a candy dispenser on his kitchen counter, the cuckoo clock wouldn't fit in any room. 

It was painted in pastel colors with a thin coat of glitter above that made it shine. Was it not for that last part, it would've looked as if it had come out right of a candy shop. Though, even if it had somehow managed to disguise itself as a pastry, Amaimon would've stared in clear disgust nonetheless, as he was now.

His eyes pierced into the offering lying on his table as if he could reduce it to nothing but dust right there, after going up in a fire way more pleasing to the eye. The colors, design, and even the smell; everything screamed of his former boss' aesthetic so loud and clear there wasn't even the need to see the little pink card that was attached to it. He didn't hesitate in throwing it all away, the last thing he wanted was anything that reminded him of that man in any room of his flat. He was done. No more--

"What happened there?"

Amaimon blinks as Lewin’s voice interrupts his train of thought.

"At your job?" Lewin presses, noticing the confusion that surfaces across Amaimon’s face.

"It has nothing to do with this."

"It clearly does!" Lewin's smile grows wider as he leans back in his chair. "I'm assuming this clock you innocently threw away is why you're here, and it was _ your boss _ who sent it to you-- which reminds me, you need to provide full names of everyone involved in the statement as you mention them." He stops balancing on the back legs of his chair to slump back forward, smile unwavering. "For follow ups and such."

Amaimon remains in silence for a while, long enough for Lewin to think he was going to reveal himself as an avatar of a dread power-- or even a host of one, he’s weird enough for that-- at any minute and drag Lewin to his patron. Wouldn't that be an interesting development to this otherwise monotonous part of his job? Lewin humors the idea while Amaimon was setting the record for the most seconds wasted on a tape recorder. At least he has stopped shredding paper.

"... Johann." Amaimon speaks up. "Johann Faust."

"And?"

"That's as full as his name gets."

"I meant what made you quit."

Amaimon blatantly ignores him and thinks back to what got him landed in this office in the first place.

The box that contained the unpleasant gift unceremoniously slid down the garbage duct to join the rest of his neighbors' garbage. He moved on with his week, or at least he thought it was a week, pretty normally after that. That is, until he came back home to find the box on his table again. Though, if you asked him what happened or what he did in the week until that happened, he would have no answer. His memory wasn’t vague or blurred, he simply had no recollection of anything he would’ve done in those days, no matter how hard he tried remembering. He guessed he went out and applied to new jobs… if those weeks even happened at all. According to his calendar, they did: he recognized his own haphazard X’s that marked each day that went by, but it was impossible, right? He couldn’t have lived those days, because he couldn’t remember a single thing. 

Everything else in his flat was intact, so if those weeks even happened at all, then why wasn’t he hungry? Thirsty? It was as if, somehow, the weeks were over the second he blinked. But that wouldn’t make sense, right? At least, no more sense than the clock continuously appearing on his table no matter how many times he disposed of it. Now, he wasn’t stupid but--

A particularly displeasing noise that sounds dangerously close to a laugh interrupts his tale.

“What?” Amaimon narrows his eyes, breaking five small layers of paper at once, his sharp gaze resolute in his anger. 

Lewin has no doubt the guy thought of that paper to be the assistant archivist. So he covers his mouth with his hand, clearly just an act of manners when the loud snort has already interrupted the subject’s statement. He leans back as if afraid of the younger man, discarding his rudeness with a wave of his hand. Though, he means none of it. “Nothing, nothing! Go on.” And for a second, he is certain Amaimon would fight back. There is an intense kind of wrath building up in the glare he regarded Lewin with, but it died down slowly as his shoulders slumped over. He is tired-- No, he sees no point in his anger, most likely. “It’s alright.” He feels the need to be somewhat reassuring; whatever this boy has gone through, it has taken a toll on him, but nothing he does well-intentioned ever comes off as genuine.

“It is not.”

“Right, you’re going to get to the spooky part at some point and then I’ll say you’re right.”

“... As I was saying, I’m not stupid.”

Amaimon wasn’t about to behave as some naive, clueless dude from a horror movie; he wasn’t going to go willingly into the basement or the attic, but he also wasn’t about to ignore the clear danger that had set his life on a weird loop. In an attempt to break out of living the same actions, he avoided not throwing it away. And, just his luck, leaving it on his table didn’t change much: he still found himself in a loop, shorter this time as he didn’t even get to live those few minutes of going out to throw the clock in the garbage duct. So, he took it out of the box instead and put it up on his bedroom wall, to keep an eye on it if it decided to disappear in the middle of the night. That, and he had the feeling that if he put it up anywhere else, it’d just get him back in a loop until it was in his room. 

Unfortunately, he was right. 

Sleeping with that thing in his room wasn’t that much of a challenge, even with all it had caused. It unnerved him slightly, but it was mostly the design rather what supernatural power it might hold, which he didn’t lose any time in doubting. Maybe the fact he was following its commands didn’t make him any smarter than the characters he had so freely thought himself to be above. And although he wished he hadn’t walked into that trap, he doubted there was anything else he could’ve done that would have gotten him out of that situation. 

So, without much choice as to what to do next, he simply went to sleep, fully aware that if anything weird didn’t happen that night then it would be even more worrying than if it did; why did that thing want to be in his room so badly, if not for continuing to mess with him?

When he woke up in the middle of the night, he cursed his logic once again. Maybe he should stop thinking overall.

It was the clock tolling midnight that woke him up. His eyes snapped open as if the noise came from right next to his ear, deafening him for a moment as he got his bearings. The first thing he noticed was how utterly dark his room was, which shouldn't have been weird, considering the time, but there was something about the density of it that felt… unsettling. That grew further with the second thing he noticed: he couldn't move. His first thought was sleep paralysis, although that rarely happened to him. The tolling sound went on longer than he expected it to, and with every deep note that echoed in his room, the darkness grew thicker, heavier, pressing down onto his chest until he couldn't breathe. With that alone, it felt like a whole year has passed by, the slow strokes of the bell drilling into his ears as more and more of his room disappeared around him until he couldn't even feel the mattress beneath him. 

Then it stopped.

It was perfectly quiet. The pressure was gone and he could move again, feeling the bed and the blankets wrapped around him again as he sat up quickly. Though he had not much time to feel relieved, as his next thought was realizing how the clock he had was a cuckoo clock, not a striking clock. That tolling sound might as well have been a product of a bad episode of sleep paralysis, but as he made out the silhouette of the cuckoo clock in the darkness, he wasn’t so sure if to find comfort in that. It hung on the wall, almost menacingly if there was a way a wooden clock could even have that characteristic. It felt alive, mocking him. Though, at that point he had enough sanity left to know that had to be his paranoia.

“Let me get this straight,” Lewin chimes in, drawing Amaimon back to the current situation. “You’re fine with hearing a striking clock in your room despite you not owning one, but you draw the line at a cuckoo clock that manipulates time laughing at you?” He crosses his arms across his chest.

Amaimon doesn’t humor him.

He tried his best to disregard the tolling bell as a vivid dream, a sleep paralysis episode, anything but an actual sound that had woken him up, but any progress he had made in calming himself down with those lies had been for naught. Every thought inside him came to an abrupt stop as his room’s door didn’t open, the sound of the lock echoing on the walls as he continued to force the doorknob. He snapped his head to where the cuckoo clock was, and he could feel it mocking him again. He was sure that thing had done this, somehow, and he wouldn’t be shocked if he couldn’t find the key anywhere in his room either (which, indeed, is what happened).

At this point, Amaimon can’t think of any lie to pretend any of this wasn’t too weird, so panic started to set in. He tried pushing the door, kicking it, and put himself against the wall to slam his foot to the side of the doorknob in hopes of breaking it off the door. Of course, it didn’t budge, not even an inch. 

He ran to the window, throwing the curtains to the side to try and open it. That, however, was stopped by the pitch black darkness beyond the glass he could barely even detect without any source of light to reflect on its surface. His eyes went as wide as they could, and he stepped backwards, a deep, bone rattling fear spreading through all of him as he stared into the darkness. Into the nothing. 

The tolling bell was back, and it struck with all its strength that he thought his eardrums would explode. He turned quickly to see that the doll inside the cuckoo clock, the one that would stroll out of the little door at the center whenever it marked 12, was a little person clad in white and purple. He didn’t even have to strain his eyesight to know who it was. That tophat was telling enough.

It felt piercing, each stroke of the bell getting closer and closer to him from behind, no matter what direction he turned to, feeling a presence watching him he couldn’t hide from. With each toll it became harder to move, until he was completely frozen, forced to stare out into the void past his room’s window. Defenseless, helpless, useless. The world had gone away and left him all alone, more so than ever. In the vastness of the empty universe, all that was left was him. 

Sweat trickled down the side of his face, his chest heaving as the edges of the window disappeared in the all consuming pitch black. 

The void was eating it. 

It was eating _ him _.

And he could feel the void crawl up his legs, pour into his eyes, freeze his fingertips to the touch of its cold nothingness and wrap all his senses in the coldest yet most loving embrace he had felt. It was terrifying him how he felt himself scream and crave it at the same time, like the realization of how empty he was what he had needed this whole time. It drained him, emptied him, and he felt miniscule, insignificant, powerless. It drew out a wickedness in him he had but ignored for a long time, as long as he was alive, and he was now at the mercy of someone else who would have him face it in this punishment for as long as they deemed fit. Amaimon felt a cold liquid stream down both sides of his neck, to meet with the collar of his shirt. He couldn’t hear the tolling anymore, he couldn't hear anything anymore. He could neither hear nor see anything, any bit of light or sound that wasn't that ominously unnatural tolling; anything that would indicate him time was passing, that this would be over soon as all things are. Over time. And yet, there was nothing. 

He could move, though, to touch the liquid and bring it to his eyes. 

He woke up, it felt like waking up, gasping for air before he could see if it was even blood. His neck and ears were dry now. Even though he had had the sensation of waking up from his bed, he was still standing on the same spot, looking at the window. Now, though, the darkness had become lighter, more... _ normal _ , natural, and he could see the street outside _ . It was over _, he had thought foolishly before another grim realization hit him back to square one of feeling completely and utterly terrified.

That night, it had been raining, he could remember that much. As it was still dark outside, despite all the hours he thought he had lived inside his room, he guessed it was still around midnight of the same night. So, naturally, the rain still poured down the street… Maybe, poured down is the wrong word to refer to what he was looking at. There were drops of water in the window glass, and he could spot a million more in the air outside his room, but they didn’t move. The ones in his glass didn’t slide down to create little roads the rest would follow, and the ones outside were suspended in mid air. He could see a perfect, frozen splash of water on the outer side of his window sill, as if he was looking at a four dimensional picture. 

Nothing was moving.

The rain, the clouds, his lungs, his eyes, his heart.

Time was frozen yet he still _ felt _. 

It went on a loop of frozen time and pitch black darkness consuming him, the cuckoo clock mocking him whenever his mind dared to wander off the reason behind this imprisonment. 

“Which was?” Lewin asks, despite already knowing the answer.

“I quit.” Amaimon says simply.

“And you shouldn’t have.”

Amaimon doesn’t nod, doesn’t even blink, but Lewin takes the silence that stretched between them as a yes. “That’s it.”

"You said it was five years, how could you tell? Time was frozen and all."

"I… don't know. It's just what came to me…" Amaimon looks down at the torn paper in front of him, though without really giving a hint he processes what he has done. Maybe he just doesn’t care. "I came back and it was the morning of the next day. I was in bed, waking up… It hadn’t even been a week."

“_ Hm _ .” Lewin shakes his head slightly as if shaking himself back into reality. “We’ll do our own research as well as try to get follow up statements from the names you gave us-- though, in this case there’s only one other person involved who also was the cause of all of it, so I can already see no process being made in that part, if we ever find this Johann guy at all. The… _ reasons _of the statements we get-- the real ones, at least--" He ignores the pointed glare Amaimon gives him. "--tend to vanish into thin air,” unless they wish to make a show of the lives they destroy, “but if we get any news on this to enlighten you on what ha--”

“No.”

Lewin tilts his head, raising his eyebrows behind his thick bangs.

“I don’t want to know. I’m just… letting it out. I will move on, and forget about it.”

“I’m not sure how well that’ll work out.”

“I don’t care.”

“Alright, well,” Lewin shrugs, reaching for the tape recorder. “Should we even bother searching Jo--” Before he can turn it off, there is a knock on the door, which draws all of Lewin’s attention, along with his hand, away from the off button. The door opens right after that, whoever is behind it not patient enough for an answer.

“Oh, my apologies, are you not done yet?”

“I was just asking him some questions about his statement, but we’re done.”

“I will take it up from here, then. Arthur needs your assistance on the field. It seems he got a new lead on where the ritual for The Corruption will be held. He _ reluctantly _told me that it was Yemen, so you can go ahead and go pack your bags.”

The wooden legs rasp against the floor as Lewin pushed himself out of the chair, making a gesture with his hands to his boss as he leaves the room. Something Amaimon can’t notice, and something he’d never know, is the grating static noise that interrupts the flow of the tape recorder, growing louder with every slow step Lewin’s boss takes towards him. 

What he can hear, however, is how the man’s heels click against the old floorboards. It echoes in the tiny room, and Amaimon can somehow feel the sound heavy in his conscience, piercing as it continues to bounce off the walls, the room’s door is closed shut, to create the illusion the distance between the table and the door is eternal. It stops, so abruptly it threw him off balance to be kicked out of the trance. He breathes in slowly, eyes desperately shooting to where the analog clock he had been staring at would be, hoping to find a comfort that has never even occurred to him before in seeing those thin, fragile needs mark the passing of something as heavy and monumental to everyone’s lives as time. To his dismay, he can’t find anymore the analog clock on the wall next to the closed door.

Amaimon has no memory of even hearing the door close.

“Do you feel any better?”

Amaimon merely stares up at him, his hands now under the table, placed on his knees as he grips them with enough strength to bruise. 

The Head of the Institute smiles at him a smug, arrogant, vile smile. “I’ll see you at work this Wednesday.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  



End file.
